1of6Ridge Wood Drive residents, from left, Lauren Berger, Payal Patel and Ashley Putz outside a home in Halfmoon, N.Y., Wednesday, May 15, 2013. The post office at first declined to provide their new neighborhood with house-by-house mail service. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)John Carl D'Annibale2of6Ridge Wood Drive residents, from left, Lauren Berger, Ashley Putz and Payal Patel outside a home in Halfmoon, N.Y., Wednesday, May 15, 2013. The trio were among neighbors fighting for mail service. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)John Carl D'Annibale3of6Ridge Wood Drive resident Ashley Putz outside her home in Halfmoon, N.Y., Wednesday, May 15, 2013. The post office had told her that her neighborhood would not have mail service, due to new regulations. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)John Carl D'Annibale4of6Ridge Wood Drive in the Rolling Hills Estates development in Halfmoon, N.Y., Wednesday, May 15, 2013. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)John Carl D'Annibale5of6Homes along Ridge Wood Drive in the Rolling Hills Estates development in Halfmoon, N.Y., Wednesday, May 15, 2013. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)John Carl D'Annibale6of6The Rolling Hills Estates developement in Halfmoon, N.Y., Wednesday, May 15, 2013. The post office had said the neighborhood would not have mail delivery. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)John Carl D'Annibale

Halfmoon

Rain, sleet and snow may not keep the U.S. Postal Service away — but the cost of gasoline just might.

That's one of the lessons from a strange dispute that pitted a newly built neighborhood in Halfmoon against postal officials. Here's another lesson: Mail delivery isn't what it used to be.

But you probably already knew that.

The Halfmoon fight centered around a new and somewhat secretive postal rule requiring new neighborhoods to have community, centralized mailboxes allowing for just one delivery stop. Door-to-door (or driveway-to-driveway) service is out for most new subdivisions — saving money and time for the financially strapped government agency.

Postal officials decided to apply the rule to nearly 40 new houses along Ridge Wood Drive. The neighborhood, now largely under construction, is the third phase of development in Rolling Hills Estates off Cary Road.

But there was a problem.

Since Rolling Hills was approved by the town in 2007, long before the rule took effect, its developer never set aside land for community mailboxes. In fact, all the existing houses in Rolling Hills receive traditional mailbox service — but postal officials said the new Ridge Wood homes would be treated differently.

And what would happen if residents couldn't find a place for community boxes?

There would be no mail delivery.

As you can imagine, that news was poorly received among the families who have been buying and moving into homes on Ridge Wood Drive. Mail service, after all, isn't something most people consider when choosing a house. It's assumed.

"Who is going to buy a house in a neighborhood with no mail?" asked Ashley Putz, 26, who was among the first residents in the new homes. "This really hurts the resale value of every house in the neighborhood."

Putz and her husband, Michael Putz, moved into their $312,000 house in April. In the weeks since, they've traveled most days to a post office in Mechanicville to retrieve their mail, and Ashley Putz, a photographer, has spent hours lobbying for the post office to reverse its decision.

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"I'm out of options," Putz said. "We've just hit a wall."

Last week, I met with Putz and two neighbors, Lauren Berger and Payal Patel, also upset by the postal decision. My visit to Ridge Wood Drive made clear just how arbitrary and silly the postal service was being. I mean, Patel's next-door neighbor, with an address on an adjacent street, was getting mail, but her mailbox sat empty day after day. She had to travel the 15 minutes into Mechanicville.

My visit also showed me how tricky it would be to jam community mailboxes into neighborhoods in which every lot is sold. Halfmoon now requires developers to consider mail delivery as part of the pre-construction planning process, but that wasn't the case when Rolling Hills was approved.

"Why are (postal officials) changing the rules in the middle of the development?" asked Richard Harris, director of planning in Halfmoon.

Wow. Ten or 20 years ago, would anyone have predicted it would come to this for a great American institution? Would anyone have believed that the Postal Service, which famously aided Western expansion by providing lifelines to remote settlements, would decide against delivery in an ordinary suburb?

Well, I can report that postal officials have had a change of heart.

When I called Maureen Marion, a regional head of corporate communications for the Postal Service, she quickly said Ridge Wood residents will get delivery to their mailboxes after all. It turns out that postal officials do have some leeway and discretion when it comes to the community- ailbox rule. It's unclear to me, in fact, if the rule is being applied evenly across the Capital Region.

Marion noted that Rolling Hills has no homeowners association, making it unclear how community mailboxes would be maintained. It would be unfair, Marion added, to require community mailboxes in a neighborhood planned six years ago.

Centralized delivery "wasn't really a top regulation then," she said. "Times have changed, and now it is."